New Equation For Free Education: MITx + HARVARDx = edX

James Marshall Crotty
, ContributorI cover education as a sector and as the bedrock of all sectors.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Just five months ago the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) introduced MITx, an online learning platform offering free online courses for anyone, anywhere to earn certificates in distance coursework. I covered the development in my popular Forbes piece, “MIT Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All.” Now, according to Svea Herbst-Bayliss in Yahoo! News, Harvard has partnered with its Cambridge neighbor on edX, an open source online learning platform featuring courses designed specifically for the Internet. According to the edX website, features of the platform will include “self-paced learning, online discussion groups, wiki-based collaborative learning, online assessments and laboratories.” In addition, edX will borrow other elements of the MITx program, including real-time feedback, video lessons, and student-ranked questions and answers.

Each school has committed $30 million to support edX. A yet unnamed not-for-profit group based in Cambridge will oversee the program. In addition, Anant Agarwal will serve as edX’s first president. He brings experience as director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He also led the development of the MITx platform. Dr. Alan Garber will head up the work at Harvard. The first five courses are expected this fall.

According to edX, “The edX website will begin by hosting MITx and Harvardx content, with the goal of adding content from other universities interested in joining the platform. EdX will also support the Harvard and MIT faculty in conducting research on teaching and learning.”

While there has been a surge in free online learning initiatives, as documented in my MITx follow-up piece, “Free Education: A Meme Whose Times Has Come,” edX, like MITx, offers a unique selling proposition: a chance to earn a certificate of completion if one masters the subject.

However, unlike the MITx certificate, the edX certification of completion will not be issued under the illustrious Harvard or MIT brand names. The credential will, instead, bear the name of the not-for-profit overseeing the edX program.

Moreover, diplomas from either school will still only be granted to formally admitted students who attend classes in person. According to Yahoo!, Harvard only accepted 5.9 percent of applicants to their undergraduate program this year. MIT only accepted 8.9 percent. In other words, if a name-brand credential is your aim, edX is not for you. However, if your aim is to gain free online access to Harvard and MIT’s excellent faculty and curriculum, then edX is precisely what you are after.

The demand for such Massively Open Online Courses (or MOOCs) has already been empirically demonstrated. According to M.I.T., 120,000 people signed up for the first such MOOC, Introduction to Circuits and Electronics, launched through MITx in March of this year. 10,000 students made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will accrue a digital certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. The same will apply in courses taught through edX.

In addition to giving students around the world an opportunity to learn through their universities, M.I.T. and Harvard will also use edX to both study how students learn as well as pioneer new ways to measure student progress. Grading in the engineering courses, for example, will be done through computers. Moreover, according to the New York Times, humanities essays could be graded by crowd-sourcing or natural language software.

Harvard and MIT are not alone in pushing the envelope on online education. Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan recently collaborated with Coursera, a new commercial concern with $16 million in venture capital, to provide similar free courseware. In addition, another online program, Udacity, was recently started by rock star Stanford professor and Google Fellow Sebastian Thrun. More than 200,000 people to date have signed up for the six courses offered through Udacity. Last fall, Thrun had 160,000 students sign up for his Artificial Intelligence course alone.

Despite these other impressive efforts, the open source nature of edX means there are no limits on the size or breadth of its content, since any university will be able to move their content onto the platform. According to the edX website, “The gathering of many universities’ educational content together on one site will enable learners worldwide to access the course content of any participating university from a single website, and to use a set of online educational tools shared by all participating universities.” Moreover, the open-source nature of edX means that other universities will be able to improve on the platform as well.

As edX President Agarwal put it, “Online education for students around the world ... is the single biggest change in education since the printing press. Our goal is to educate a billion people around the world.”

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